Having started with Rogue, Larn, Moria, and (Net)Hack, I just wouldn't feel right about playing a Rogue-like with anything but letters & characters.

However, I do find that a lot of the colours really don't show up well on my screen. I would like it if there was some way to make characters more visible. I was looking at the screen-shots for ToME, and it looks like occupied squares are hi-lit at the corners. Something like that would be most excellent.

This is for tile users. I'm curious to hear whether anyone uses the old 8x8 tiles.

I use the old tiles EXCLUSIVELY. Just plain don't like the newer tiles, their colors, etc. If not for the old tiles, I'd probably play ascii.

the old tiles have great contrast. I found the others too subtle for me.

My only complaint is about black colored monsters. They don't show up well against black background on my tiny laptop that I use on the weekends - it's one part old laptop, one part eroding eyesight. [after this post, I took a look and saw that I could edit the .bmp holding the tiles, so I did some slight mods, like adding some lighter dots to dark creatures, adding a touch of green to open doors, red to closed doors, etc.]

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Oh, but I fantasize about having a nicer pic or even rotating, moving 3d model that comes up in the Monster Memory views. Might be a nice fun project for someone. I could think of a few other advanced features to add, like using a richer window container (like browser window) with mouseover info events/windows, but that's just a lot of icing on the cake and would really bloat and complicate things if not done well.

I've tried using tiles with Vanilla, but quickly found them to be unplayable. I have a hard time distinguishing between the smaller tiles. I might use the 32x32 tiles if I had a larger monitor or if LOS range was smaller.

The problem is that monsters can see you from 20 tiles away in both directions. Therefore it's desirable to be able to see 40 tiles in both X and Y dimensions. With 32x32 tiles, that corresponds to 1280 pixels of data in the vertical dimension - my monitor just isn't that big.

It's hard for me to pay careful attention to the monster list window (even though I leave it on), so if a monster isn't visible on the main display I'm likely to be killed by it while it's still off-screen.

I do like the idea of tiles, though. I wanted my own project (Cryptband) to be playable with 32x32 tiles, and that's that primary reason I lowered LOS range to 15 and reduced room sizes across the board.